HiPerConTracer – A Versatile Tool for IP Connectivity Tracing in Multi-Path Setups

A paper describing our Open Source measurement tool HiPerConTracer (High-Performance Connectivity Tracer) has been accepted for presentation at the 28th IEEE SoftCOM 2020 in Hvar, Dalmacija/Croatia in September!

For details about HiPerConTracer, including sources and PPA builds, see https://www.nntb.no/~dreibh/hipercontracer/.

For the paper, see: Dreibholz, Thomas: «HiPerConTracer – A Versatile Tool for IP Connectivity Tracing in Multi-Path Setups» (PDF, 4898 KiB, in English), in Proceedings of the 28th IEEE International Conference on Software, Telecommunications and Computer Networks (SoftCOM), Hvar, Dalmacija/Croatia, September 2020, [BibTeX, XML].

Abstract: Nowadays, we see a steadily increasing number of Internet devices with connections to multiple networks. For example, every smartphone provides mobile broadband and Wi-Fi connectivity. Multi-path transport protocols, like MPTCP, CMT-SCTP or Multipath-QUIC, allow for utilising all connected networks simultaneously. However, while there is a lot of research on the Transport Layer aspects of multi-path transport, there is not much work on the Network Layer perspective, yet. In this paper, we introduce our Open Source tool HiPerConTracer (High-Performance Connectivity Tracer) for efficient, parallelised, long-term measurements of the path connectivity characteristics among multi-homed Internet systems. HiPerConTracer is now running as a permanent feature in the NorNet Core infrastructure, which is used for research on multi-homed systems, and in particular for research on multi-path transport. Based on the HiPerConTracer data collected in NorNet Core so far, we finally present some interesting results from the analysis of the inter-continental site connectivity between China and Norway in January 2020.